08th July 2021 - Françoise Girard is the leader of the International Women’s Health Coalition. A lawyer by training, she is a long-time supporter and expert on women’s health, human rights, sexuality, as well as HIV and AIDS.
Françoise Girard is frequently asked by governments and UN agencies and has been active to making sure that global frameworks comprise and further women’s rights.
Girard played a key position in advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights at UN conferences such as ICPD+5, Beijing+5, General Assembly Special Sessions on HIV/AIDS and on Children, ICPD+10, the 2005 World Summit (Millennium Development Goals), and the procedure to negotiate the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Senior Program Officer for International Policy at IWHC
From 1999 to 2003, she was Senior Program Officer for International Policy at IWHC, and afterwards a consultant for IWHC, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and DAWN, a network of women’s rights activists from the global South. Prior to returning to IWHC in 2012, she was Director of the Public Health Program at Open Society Foundations, where she was also Regional Director for Central plus Eastern Europe and Haiti in the 1990s.
Serve for Board of the Women’s Funding Network
Girard has provided support on the Board of the Women’s Funding Network, and on the optional Committee of the Health and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. She was the Chair of the Leadership Programme Committee of the 2010 International AIDS Conference, a 20,000+ participant biannual scientific conference.
The International Women's Health Coalition (IWHC) is a nongovernmental organization discovered in 1984 based in New York City. It centres on issues relating to women and girls' human rights, health and impartiality and represents part of the women's movement that distinguishes that numerous challenges to gender equality lie in challenges in health problems and in raising families. The IWHC is one of the oldest presently active global feminist groups.

Her articles have been available broadly in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Health and Human Rights, Global Health Policy, Journal of Adolescent Health, International Family Planning standpoints and Reproductive Health Matters. Other publications comprise “Negotiating Sexual Rights and Sexual Orientation at the United Nations, in SexPolitics: Report from the Front Lines, 2007; plus Advocacy for Sexuality plus Women’s Rights: Continuities, Discontinuities and tactics since ICPD in Reproductive Health and Human Rights: She has been referenced by BBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, Washington Post, The protector, Boston Globe, Associated Press, CBC/Radio-Canada, The New Yorker along with The Nation, among others. Current speaking engagements include C2 Montréal 2018, and 2018 Aspen Ideas: Spotlight Health.

She is an M.A in Political Science
Girard is an M.A. in Political Science (Soviet Politics) from McGill University and an LL.B. from the Université de Montréal. She was a law clerk to Justice Charles Gonthier of the Supreme Court of Canada. She speaks French, Spanish, plus Russian.